Your Calendar Needs an Upgrade

A little data-driven self-knowledge can be a wonderful thing. As Lenore Skenazy points out in her amusing Wall Street Journal review of Laura Vanderkam’s I Know How She Does It, even the most successful super-achievers remain oblivious to where their time really goes.

“Never one to take the lazy approach,” Skenazy writes, “[Vanderkam] decided to gather hard data. So she solicited time logs from nearly 150 women making at least $100,000 a year who have at least one child under 18 living at home.”

“The result? A time-diary study of 1,001 days, divided into half-hour chunks. These detailed diaries…show a whole lot of work going on but a whole lot of leisure time, too.”

In fact, Skenazy reports, “…once they looked over a week’s worth of their own activities, they were surprised by the large amount of time they spent with their families. Wrote one: ‘I no longer feel guilty.’”

That’s liberating. “Until we can manage time,” Peter Drucker declared in The Effective Executive, “we can manage nothing else.” To truly see how time is spent, invested and/or wasted transforms how its value is understood. Greater self-awareness about time inspires greater time for self-awareness.

For Vanderkam’s women, self-knowledge empowered. That power of self-knowledge didn’t merely help them work smarter, it made them feel better, as well. Win/win. But they ultimately had to see it to believe it.

In an era of Outlook, Google and iWatches, who doesn’t (digitally) manage their calendars and review schedules? No, there’s nothing novel about time management. But virtually everything about its tools and technologies is in flux.

So let’s update and upgrade our approach to time management. There’s no reason it can’t be better and more innovative — all the technical ingredients are there.

Self-quantification has quickly become the most valuable coin of the introspection realm. Fitbits and Garmins track steps and heart rates; Mint and American Express monitor expenditures; a nascent Google app promises to instantly convert photos of your food into calorie counts. There’s no shortage of selfies. Media and methods for self-monitoring along multiple dimensions have exploded exponentially.

But time management has seemingly stood still. As I reviewed my calendar, I was struck by its visual banality. No pie charts; no histograms. No creative visualizations of the whos, hows, and whats associated with the whens and wheres. No synthesized, aggregated, or comprehensive views were readily available. No computational comparisons of time spent/managed in the immediate or distant past. Visually and algorithmically, my email, searches, and social media were “smarter” than my calendar.

My calendar(s) should be telling me where—and how—I’ve been spending my most productive time at work and leisure. My calendar should flag my “Top 5 Timewasters” in the next month. There should be graphics dynamically illustrating the three most significant “time shifts” in emphasis over the past 100, 365 and 1000 days.

Where are time management’s counterpart to selfies? Who will be the Edward Tufte of personal productivity?

Emulating Vanderkam, I asked more than 20 high-performing colleagues and acquaintances this question: Do you view—or review—time spent in any sort of interesting or novel way?

The overwhelming answer was “no.” Almost all of them scrupulously managed their calendars, contacts, and to-do lists. But barely a handful broke the bonds of a calendar format to map time and effort. Just as intriguing, no one said they consistently compared/contrasted their time allocations from six months, a year, or three years ago with how they managed time now.

A couple of finance people converted Excel spreadsheets into calendars that let them chart time spent and deadlines in genuinely intriguing ways. Another used Toggl-like apps for visualizing their life as a series of color-coded projects to be managed. Another pair embraced the “personal kanban” approach to manage calendars as workflows. Their time management was “lean” (or just-in-time.)

Each of these approaches was fascinating and revealing. None were comprehensive or holistic.

The oddest factoid? Over half of these informal respondents were serious self-quantifiers. They knew how many steps they took in a day and how fitful their sleep had been. Examining patterns around health and fitness, yes; visualizing yesterdays and tomorrows from new angles, not so much.

Arguably the best way to answer, “Where did the time go?” is to ask “How is the time management?” It’s time for our calendars to become better partners not just for better scheduling our futures, but for better understanding our pasts.